Automatic Revision Planner

April 15, 2008 6:44 AM

I need a solution which will help me work out my revision plan automatically (Possible Excel filter?) Please help!

Hello everyone

I'm revising for university exams at the moment. The way I do this is to go through either the textbook or my notes, making summaries as I go.

At school I used to set myself to do an hour of this, an hour of that etc. but I found that didn't work as I rushed things somewhat. So I've set out a plan which requires me to do a certain number of pages for each exam every day.

The trouble with this is, I still miss things out! I'll skip a day because of whatever, or I won't manage to get one set of pages for a certain exam done, or (as I've had to do) I realise that there is some additional book it would be useful to look at, so I double the amount of pages I'm doing in order to fit the second book in afterwards.

What I would love to do would be to have a program which I can type in the number of pages I have to do, the date I have to have revised them by, and whether I'm planning to take a break on certain days (or over the weekend), and also be able to tell it if I missed certain day, or didn't finish all the pages for one day, and have it tell me what I need to do over the remaining time available to catch up.

I use Windows (so no cross-platform solutions needed, though that would be cool), and I'm guessing maybe an Excel spreadsheet would work best for this, but I would prefer a web-based solution (although I could just upload it to Google Docs).

I have no idea how to implement this, but it would be such a cool idea for students and GTDers the world over.

Thanks in advance for your help!

posted by edbyford to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Kind of like this assignment calculator?
posted by b33j at 7:21 AM on April 15, 2008

@beej
Hmmm.... nice try, but no. That seems to give some sort of arbitrary project plan defined by the owners of that website. I'm looking for something different.
posted by edbyford at 7:44 AM on April 15, 2008

Are the pages actually independent? As in, is one "unit" of revision time equal to one page, so that you can revise any number of pages in a day. (My notes tend to be in groups, so I'll have three or four pages on, say, benzene chemistry, and want to revise them all together).

If not surely it's a simple division? You have x days left, y pages to do so you need to do y/x pages every day... You could certainly do that in Excel, though a pocket calculator would be easier.

Otherwise, it's rather more complicated... I'd probably use a diagram of what "blocks" of notes I have and what free time and schedule blocks over weeks instead of individual pages.
posted by katrielalex at 10:22 AM on April 15, 2008